


no man is an island

by Nocturnememory



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Female Harry Potter, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:13:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24222598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nocturnememory/pseuds/Nocturnememory
Summary: Vernon Dursley was a normal boy born to a normal family in a normal home.Exceedingly average, he was told. Average grades for an average boy born to a man who worked nine to five and a mother who made pot pie.Healthy, middle class, fed-fat on just a bit more than enough, than necessary, than maybe that’s too much..Fem!Harry, request from Tumblr.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 104





	no man is an island

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文-普通话 國語 available: [【中文翻译】没有人是一座孤岛](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27008695) by [Lwnixndk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lwnixndk/pseuds/Lwnixndk)



> Posting old stuff, because it's collecting dust on my computer and once upon a time some lovely person prompted this and i think they deserve to have them again.

* * *

_Because they were perfectly normal, thank you very much._

* * *

Vernon Dursley was a normal boy born to a normal family in a normal home.

  
_Exceedingly average,_ he was told. Average grades for an average boy born to a man who worked nine to five and a mother who made pot pie. 

Healthy, middle class, fed-fat on just a bit more than enough, than necessary, than _maybe that’s too much._

A father who worked, drank, slept, repeated. Worked, drank, slept, repeated. A man who read the newspapers, smoked cigars and said, _a man’s worth is what he can provide for his family._

A man that said, _we are all God’s creatures, Vernon. But God made man first._

_._

There was a girl when he was fourteen. She was proper, pretty, perfect in the way fourteen-year-old girls can be to boys who fancy them.

She sat a row ahead of him in class and he spent the year watching her hair curl at the nape of her neck, watched her wrist as she wrote, her shoulders when she raised an arm to answer a question.

(And there’s a flaw here, thinking watching is knowing when its really only a film, a moving picture left to your mind’s interpretation.)

So he asked her, _would you— perhaps, fancy to—_

But her eyes had moved over him, past him and she’d say no before he’d even managed the word walk.

Vernon Dursley was average in this too: that so often men are told that they are movers and doers and creators.

That men are the axis on which the world revolves. 

So Vernon Dursely does what so many do when faced with rejection:

Substitute reason for excuse and thinks, _prissy, stuck-up and whore._

  
(But he is normal, thank you very much, and a man doesn’t chase skirt, Vernon.)

.

He’s a cog in a wheel at the start, but Vernon Dursley knows that men are valued only on what they can provide and if he can’t provide attraction he’ll provide stability. Because a thick wallet is the next best quality a man can have, don’t you know?

His father said, _no man is an island, bah! I provide well enough, don’t I?_

But Vernon knows his father never rose above a cog in a machine in a nine to five job.

Came home to a lit cigar, a beer and a chicken pot pie. Repeat. Came home to a lit cigar, a beer and a chicken pot pie.

.

And then he meets Petunia and she’s perfect in a way that someone can be only when they're first in love.

Perfectly average, perfectly narrow, resides in the pockets of space that Vernon does not. 

  
And she makes pot pie.

.

Vernon Dursley loves Petunia Evans. 

  
And like those moments where his father’s voice would slur or his mother would flinch, Petunia says, tearfully, _oh Vernon, I have to tell you something—_

Followed by, _sister_ and _secret_ and _unnatural_.

_But, no man is an island, bah!_

  
Vernon Dursley provides.

(Besides, all houses have a little dirt beneath the rug, don’t they?)

.

Petunia Evans becomes Petunia Dursley and unnatural is a thing that slowly twists into a red-headed sister into a boy with a mop of dark hair who rides a broom, Vernon, like some kind of—  
Freak.

But Vernon provides.

  
.

  
.

  
It starts with a bruise.

A purple thing that fades to brown, to yellow, to a dull shadow around the bone-thin of her wrist.

A crown of fingertips around the thin of her upper arm. 

Maybe it’s more plural than that.

It starts with bruises. 

  
The first time he raises his hand, he doesn’t think he means to hurt her but he _does_ , and he isn’t sorry, because there’s something unnatural inside of her and Petunia has whispered it for so long that Harrie James Potter is a pale thing that lingers in the shadows of their house like she’s more an after-thought, an off-cast girl, a slinking thing in peripherals.

  
_She wasn’t meant to be here,_ Petunia said, _we had plans._

A boy, no more, just one to carry on a name.

To take all that love Petunia said she’d lost the moment her sister had opened a letter with only one name.

  
(Because hearts degrade and sometimes it takes years but sometimes it only takes the length of one letter written in blue pic pen from a ten-year-old’s hand.)

  
_It was polite enough,_ Petunia had told him. (Sometime after they had opened the door to a bundle of blankets and a note saying, _sorry and sister and dead.)_

  
And she laughs a little now, because _I can’t believe I ever wanted to be like her, what was I thinking, wanting to be a—_

  
_Freak._

_._

Vernon Dursley has always been average, thank you very much. 

  
But he’s never been powerful either.

  
(And dominance is a learned thing, taught on quiet dinner tables, on beer cans, on chicken pot pies.)

  
And dominance so easily turns to cruelty.

.

Harrie James Potter is the slurred voice, the flinch, the little spot of dirt always swept under the rug.

And it starts with a bruise, a handprint, gripped on when she spits, _Privet isn’t my home._ And they’re in the car and she flinches back because he’s hit hurt her before and she’s that little bit of alcohol after a long day because he promised Petunia he’d never be a man who relied on spirits. 

So the girl flinches, and her wrist is a tiny thing in the meat of his hand because she’s not a bundle of blankets anymore but a thirteen-year-old girl. 

A thirteen-year-old girl who acts like she doesn’t flinch.

So. It starts with a bruise. (Because cruelty is a learned thing but it’s all really about dominance and he’s never been powerful but she flinches and bruises and when he says _Freak_ she listens.)

But Vernon Dursley is perfectly normal, thank you very much. Besides, times are a bit different now and you don’t take out your nine to five mediocrity out on your wife or drown in out in cigars in alcohol. 

  
Or chicken pot pies. 

But she flinches and bruises and maybe its bruised his mind as well, he thinks. Tints in purple, green, blood blister. Because somehow it starts with a bruise but then he remembers the way she darts away from him, around him—

  
Because she’s afraid of him. (And isn’t this about dominance, after all?)

But Vernon Dursely provides, and no man is an island may have been true for his father but he has a wife and son and he loves them.

  
He does.

  
And there are certain things you do not do.

(Though, he thinks, if your mind is bruised are you really at fault for what it imagines?)  
If the blood-blister bursts and you think about the ways you can make her flinch a little more—

  
_But, no man is an island_ , he thinks and kisses his wife and eats her pot pie and tells his son that a man’s worth is only what he can provide for his family.

* * *


End file.
